Academic actor ... John Wood in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love at the National in 1997. Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex Features

I've been very lucky in my professional life. And one of my greatest strokes of good fortune was arriving at the Guardian at the very moment when John Wood, who has died aged 81, was emerging into the front rank of British actors. He was always a joy to write about.

Partly because, with his accosting profile and lean frame, he presented an ineradicable physical image. But even more because, when he wasn't creating new characters in Stoppard plays, he redefined every role he played.

That, for me, is the ultimate test of a great actor: to make you see things in a new light. Olivier did it through divine intuition: Wood through a piercing intellect that led him, at one stage, to think of becoming an academic. He was, for instance, the first Brutus I'd ever seen to suggest that behind the character's surface nobility lay a self-regarding vanity. No actor has also ever brought out better King Lear's emotional anarchy: I've never forgotten how Wood, having issued the most terrifying threats to Goneril, suddenly rushed up to embrace her. And, in one of his last stage appearances playing Spooner in Pinter's No Man's Land at the National, he offered a whole new perception of the character. I suddenly realised that Spooner may not, after all, be a minor poet but a total charlatan who just happens to find himself swept up into a world of literary opulence.

On my occasional encounters with John Wood, I also found him to be as witty and surprising off-stage as he was on. He once told me how much he owed to Jerry Lewis, for whom he did a couple of films. His favourite story about Lewis was how, in one movie, the star had to put down all the balls on a pool table in a single, lightning stroke. He did it in one take and, said Wood, "what he taught me was never to be afraid". But Wood was wryly funny about his own early struggles as an actor in the 1950s. At the Old Vic, he said, "one felt one was simply the cheapest way of getting the costume on stage". Of being sacked from the Royal Court where he was a script-reader and occasional director, he said: "Although they were paying me nothing at all, I gathered they couldn't afford to go on paying me nothing at all."

Much as I admired Wood, I do have a guilty confession to make. Over dinner one night in New York, where he was starring in Ira Levin's Deathtrap, I suggested he should return to the role of Richard III which he'd famously played as an Oxford student. He did go on to play it at the National and was not thanked for his pains. But that was one of the few false strokes in a brilliant career. Although Wood never became, except on Broadway, a popular star, he had no equal in my lifetime in portraying neurotic desperation or self-mocking irony.